Provisional WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2016

Humanitarian consequences
Annual and long-term changes in the climate system can aggravate social, humanitarian and environmental pressure. According to International Organisation for Migration, population migration is expected to increase as a result of more frequent and potentially more intense weather-related disasters, competition and conflict over shrinking resources, and rising sea levels rendering coastal and low lying zones uninhabitable.

According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), in 2015 there were 19.2 million new displacements associated with weather, water, climate and geophysical hazards in 113 countries, more than twice as many as for conflict and violence. Of these, weather-related hazards triggered 14.7 million displacements. South and East Asia dominated in terms of the highest absolute figures, but no region of the world was unaffected. Equivalent data for 2016 are not yet available.

Extreme weather and climate related events influenced by the strong El-Niño in 2015/2016 had significant negative impacts on agriculture and food security. More than 60 million people around the world were affected by these events, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

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Global temperature anomalies are computed using three global datasets: HadCRUT4.4, jointly produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; the GISTEMP analysis (2016 version), produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS); and the NOAA Merged Land Ocean Global Surface Temperature Analysis Dataset (version 4.0), produced by NCEI. WMO also uses European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting ERA-40 reanalysis data.

A number of definitions exist for the pre-industrial period, the most commonly used being 1850-99 and 1880-99. The value of 1.2 °C is valid (to the nearest 0.1 °C) whichever of these periods is chosen.

Information on humanitarian and environmental impacts was provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the UN Environment Programme